Chapter 37 Chapter 37
…it collapse and rebuild from the pieces.
"I have to go," I said.
"It's a trap," Catherine said. "This is how they neutralize you. They get you inside the city, and then they either keep you or use you as leverage."
"Maybe," I said. "But if I don't go, I prove that the confederation doesn't actually believe in what it was built on. I prove that we only work toward justice when it's convenient."
I went to Ljubljana.
Alex came with me, despite my protests. Raven came too.
The city was controlled but not chaotic. The workers had taken over the administrative buildings, but they weren't engaged in violence. They were making a point.
Their leader was a woman named Marija, who'd been born in a labor camp during the research network era and had spent her entire life building things for people who owned her.
"I'm tired," she said when we met. "Tired of new systems that are just old systems with different names. Tired of being promised freedom and getting restructured slavery."
"What do you want?" I asked.
"I want to know if anything can actually change," she said. "Or if this is just what humans and supernaturals do. Build new systems that are slightly less worse than the old ones, and call it progress."
I didn't have a good answer.
"I think change is possible," I said finally. "But I think it's much slower and harder than we want it to be. And I think it requires people to keep pushing even when they're tired. Especially when they're tired."
"That's not a very inspiring answer," Marija said.
"No," I admitted. "But it's an honest one."
The negotiation in Ljubljana took a week.
We established that the labor camps would be shut down. That workers would be given compensation for time worked without pay. That the regional administrator would be removed from power.
But we also established that the workers couldn't just take over governance themselves. That they needed to build structures, elect leaders, create systems that could sustain themselves.
"We can't just replace one unjust system with another," I said. "We have to actually build justice. And that means structures. Rules. Boring, technical things that don't feel revolutionary but actually are."
Marija and her group agreed, exhausted but willing to try.
As we were leaving, she pulled me aside.
"Will this actually work?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "But it's better than the alternative."
But Ljubljana didn't end the crisis. It was just the first crack that became visible.
Within months, similar uprisings happened in three other territories. Each one required negotiation. Each one required compromise. Each one revealed that the confederation was built on foundations that couldn't actually sustain the weight of what was being put on them.
The confederation council met in an emergency session in Geneva.
"We need to fundamentally restructure," I said. "We need to go back to first principles. Why did we build this? What were we actually trying to accomplish?"
"We were trying to prevent war," someone said.
"Were we?" I asked. "Or were we trying to maintain power in a different form? Because that's what it looks like now. We're maintaining control. Just with different faces doing the controlling."
"So what do you want to do?" Catherine asked. "Burn it down and start again?"
"I don't know," I said. "But I know that what we have isn't working."
"Nothing works," Catherine said flatly. "Everything gets corrupted. Every system gets compromised. That's not a flaw in this particular system. That's a feature of power itself.”
"Then maybe we need less power," Sophia said. She'd gotten seats on the council by being elected in her territory. "Maybe we need to distribute it more widely. Make it so that no single person or government can do much damage on their own."
"That's anarchism," someone objected.
"Is it?" Sophia asked. "Or is it just the logical conclusion of what the confederation was supposed to be?"
The restructuring took another year.
We moved away from centralized decision-making. We created networks of smaller communities that made decisions locally but coordinated internationally on shared concerns.
It was messier. It was slower. It was less efficient.
But it also meant that power was distributed in a way that made consolidation harder.
It wasn't perfect. But it was different.
And different was something.
At the end of year three of the restructured confederation, something strange happened.
A group of scientists approached Raven with evidence of a new problem.
The research network hadn't just been conducting experiments. They'd been doing something
else. Something they'd carefully hidden even from the most thorough investigations.
They'd been attempting to create something. Not a cure. Not a treatment. A hybrid.
A being that combined human and supernatural traits in unprecedented ways.
"It shouldn't have been possible," Dr. Tanaka said when we brought her in to verify. She'd become our expert on what the research
network had been trying to accomplish. "Genetically,the incompatibility is too great. But if they were patient enough, if they were willing to accept massive failure rates…”
"How many failures are we talking about?" I asked.
"Maybe thousands," she said. "For every one that succeeded."
"And how many succeeded?" Raven asked.
"We don't know," Dr. Tanaka said. "But based on the records, at least a dozen. Maybe more."
Twelve people out there who were neither human nor supernatural. Who had abilities that shouldn't exist. Who'd been created in laboratories and then... released? Escaped? Hidden?
"We have to find them," Catherine said.
"And do what?" I asked. "Capture them? They're people. Or at least, I assume they're people."
"We don't know what they are," Catherine said. "They could be dangerous."
"They could also be victims," I said. "Created without consent, modified without choice. We don't get to decide they're dangerous just because they're different."
But Catherine was already working with enforcement to start a search.
It was only a matter of time before the public found out.
And when they did, everything we'd built started to crack again.
The discovery leaked two weeks later.
News outlets started running stories about "super-soldiers" or "genetic abominations" or "evidence that the research network succeeded where we thought they'd failed."
Some people demanded that we find and capture these hybrids. Some demanded that we protect them. Some demanded that we acknowledge that the whole confederation was built on a foundation of this kind of experimentation and we should just accept that some level of inhumanity was necessary.
I called Raven.
"We have to find them before Catherine's enforcement division does," I said.
"How?" Raven asked. "They could be anywhere. And if they don't want to be found, we might never locate than.”
"Then we make a public offer," I said. "We say that anyone who's been modified by the research network can come forward. That we'll help them. That we won't imprison them or study them further. That we just want to help."
"That's naive," Raven said.
"Maybe," I said. "But it's also the only way I can think to do this without perpetuating what the research network was doing."
The offer went out across all media channels.
I was who made it.